As Bradley’s cross country team prepares for next week’s Notre Dame Invitational, a few different faces got a shot at a title in the Brissman/Lundeen Invitational Sept. 26.
Bradley sent a total of 12 players to the meet. A majority, if not all of them, were runners who do not get to see action in some of the bigger meets.
Head Coach Willy Wood said the team does this so everyone can run.
“We have a dual schedule to allow everybody the opportunity to compete a minimum number of times,” Wood said. “We don’t designate varsity or [junior varsity] or A-team or B-team by any means, so this race was more to give everybody a chance to compete.”
And compete they did. The women’s team finished third, paced by sophomore Lauren Cunningham, who clocked a 22:59.3 in the 6K event to finish 24th.
Cunningham was one of five Braves, including freshmen Jennifer Luskan and Kathryn Adelman, who placed in the top 50 of the event. Coach Wood said he liked how the team competed, even if they were not the team’s regulars.
“They competed very well,” Wood said. “Twelve women did not go to the meet, so to watch these kids step up to the extent they did, to see the upperclassmen exhibit very strong leadership, it was a very strong day for us.”
Meanwhile, the men’s team did not place in the event. Two of the runners failed to finish the race after one suffered an ankle injury and the other had trouble breathing.
Junior Thomas Razo led Bradley’s men by placing 70th in the 8K, missing a career-best time by five seconds. The next-highest Brave was junior Joe Fritzche, who ran a 27:32:0 to finish 142nd out of the 525 runners who finished the race.
The entire Bradley team will be in action this weekend at Notre Dame, Indiana, where Coach Wood says they will face some of the top teams in the nation.
“It’s definitely the premier meet of the country this weekend,” Wood said. “Many of the top teams will be there, it’ll be very intense competition. It’ll be a great opportunity for us to see where we stack up against some of the better runners in the country and to see if we’ve made the kind of progress that we feel like we made.”
